"What's the matter with Sadie, anyhow?" said Blainey, shrugging his shoulders. "What's she kicking about? She gets twenty weeks, whether we smash or not. I say, Judge, go and jolly her up a bit. Tell her she's got a grand part! I want to talk business with this little girl." And without concerning himself further, he led the way to his private office. Doré followed quietly. During the last two hours she had been balancing on various emotions. The first glamour of the intoxicating overture had been shattered. She looked on with sober eyes at this spectacle of the theater reduced to its materialistic verities. She was too imaginative not to perceive the outrages committed in the name of the box-office, and too keen not to credit Blainey's logic. The fat idol-like figures of Guntz, Borgfeldt and Keppelman were realities, too; she would have to deal with that type, too--many of that type--if she chose to continue. And she had remained in long periods of absorption, scarcely hearing the remarks Massingale whispered to her, wondering, trying to see into the future, asking herself if this were to be the solution, and, if it were, how to play it. Musing thus, she continued to watch Blainey closely, wondering. Blainey and Harrigan Blood were of the same tribe; they could not be fed on sugar-plums! The office was a comfortable, pleasantly lighted room, in the greatest disorder possible. Blainey swept aside a litter of papers, and sank into a huge upholstered chair, studying Doré, who vaulted to a seat on the desk. [Illustration: Doré vaulted to a seat on the desk] Seen in the daylight, his head seemed to have been scraped and roughened by the long buffeting of adversity and the rough passage upward. The ears that leaped from the solid head, the sharp pointed nose with large nostrils, the wide mouth of a great fish, the shaggy brows and eyes of the fighter, the thin gray cockatoo rise of hair on the forehead as if grasped by an invisible hand--all had about them the signs of the battler, whose defiant motto might appropriately have been: "Don't bump me!" Blainey glanced at half a dozen telegrams, news from productions scattered over the country, and raised his glance again. "You're not mixed up with Roderigo Sanderson, are you?" "Who?" She had taken off her fur toque with a charming gesture of intimacy, and was arranging her hair in the opposite mirror, her feet swinging merrily. "Sanderson." "Did you see who brought me here?" she said impertinently. The answer saved the actor an engagement. With Blainey she assumed always the disdain of a woman of the world. "Don't get mixed up with actors," he persisted, a note of jealousy in his voice. "Steer clear!" "Managers are safer, you mean!" she said, laughing at him. That was not his meaning, but he continued: "I don't have to tell you much, do I, kid?" "Not much, Blainey." "That was Sassoon with you, eh?"